PROPOSITIONED FOR A BARTER AND BLESSING

Hair Down Hockey.

I was offered two young women at West Park on Saturday but could not afford them. Mohammed - all his friends were called thet, too - said I could take them away on payment of six camels.

I thought about it for a second or two. Then pretending I had a few more ships of the desert than I really needed, I asked Mohammed (his and all the others' names change, as the day wears on, to BIn Drinking) what it would cost me to hand them back to him, should they give rise to dissatisfaction.

"Ten camels," came his prompt reply. I had to come clena. I could offer him only budgerigars. In terms of transporting he and his friend back home to London they'd by useless. The negotiations were abandoned and they got back on with the game..

This is the Penguin Mixed Hockey Festival.

Mohammed and his friends Mohammed - men and women - were naturally enough dressed in arab kaftans with the normal desert headgear. All procured for £5 each in an Egyptian bazaar by two players, Lynn Sandy and James Smith. This was their playing kit.

Later, at Paltine Park, I was attracted to two cheerleaders. "We're both tour virgins," they gaily assured me. "We've been practising for weeksfor this. We're Raleigh Elementary. We comne from Nottingham. I'm Susanna, And I'm Rachel."

Their matronly head girl, Dawn, quickly stepped in. "I've been training them for six hard weeks and they're still rubbish. They were ugly, they had no friends, no dress sense, they neede singing lessons: they were the girls no one would play with."

I looked at Susanna and Rachel. They showed me their centre-spot routine when Raleigh score. They were truly a couple of tryers. But Dawnhad done an efficient preparation job on them. when the words they were singing and danced hit home, I knew it was the right moment to make my excuses and leave.

This is the Penguin Mixed Hockey Festival.

Later still, at Northbrook, I was blessed - by monks from the Isle of Wight: a new rival abbey to Quarr, based at a women's club called Vectis and a men's called Ryde. Or was that Corr! and Ride?

They addressed me, as wellas each other, women too, as 'Brother'. Accompanied by the sound of Gregorian chant, the Wight Dynamite haunt the festival.

Material things are unimportant to them. A bell rings during the game and, to a man and woman, they instantly fall to their knees to offer up prayer. Opposition are certain to score at sacred, elevated moments like this. But, of course, that is unimportant.

They gave the Penguin Mixed Hockey Festival a lofty, spiritual dimension of higher ethics to make it the envy of its smaller rivals across the country.

Lake teacher Nikki Mumford made the monks' habits out of discarded hotel sheets from the busy IoW tourist industry. The tonsure wigs were 'authentic', the team's tour rule scripted on luminously illustrated parchment rolls.

In their ten visits, Mrs Mumford, informed me, The Wight Dynamites have appeared as convicts, surgeons, among other numerous disguises.

Long may they return. For they, the Thirsty Camels, the Raleigh Elementary and so many others, restore to this mad, mad world a rare weekend of sanity.

It's something the visiting German teams clearly cherish and for which they are prepared annually to travel.

Taken from: The Worthing Herald
Thursday, May 9, 2002